Soundwalk: Liminal Spaces

You can find our final draft here.

The Process:

We started by noting that the Tisch staircase was a fascinating place, and from there began playing with the idea of drawing attention to liminal spaces. Our initial sound-gathering involved taking samples of every liminal space we could find — train stations, crosswalks, waiting rooms, lobbies, and so on. Once we began fully diagramming our arc, we decided to abandon our initial love, the staircase, for accessibility reasons, but after doing research on architecture theory we discovered that the entry hall to the Tisch Building at 721 Broadway served our purposes perfectly. We hope to create an environment that prompts the listener to consider a space that is generally ignored as a transitional space between one location and another. Specifically, we wanted to draw attention to the importance of these transitional or liminal spaces as (a) consciously designed in order to aid in this transition and (b) as spaces that, in seamlessly transitioning the voyager from one experience to another, have a great deal of agency over us that we rarely notice.

We spent a while debating our route, and forming an arc that we felt would both accomplish our goals and fit within a short timespan. What we settled on was starting in the back area of the entrance hall, spending about two minutes wandering through, and then spending a minute out in the chaos on the street (the home of the “ unwanted polluted matter” that, according to Roderick Lawrence, entry halls are designed to filter out). We then split it into sections to edit ourselves, and I was lucky enough to do the third section: chaos.

I wanted to create a sensation of rising disorientation that still incorporated the ambient noise of the street outside the Tisch building, and did so by layering tracks we’d recorded all over the city, emphasizing harsher noises (train screech, horns honking) while also including several vocal tracks overlaid over one another to further decentralize and confuse the listener. I also did some toying with Audition’s mixer during this process — unfortunately my heavy distortion was nixed as being “unbelievably annoying” and “distracting” but you’ll catch some vocal isolation and maybe some reverb if you listen closely enough.

To bring this together, I slowly raised the volume and added more layers as the track builds to its climax at about the 51 second mark. You can take a look at my beautiful sound baby here:

And listen to some initial drafts here — https://soundcloud.com/brentagon.

The climax is followed by a prompt to return inside, then a quote noting the significance of the entrance door as the gateway between the unclean and clean, the sacred and profane, then the listener is guided to the elevator, given a Laozi quote to marinate on (“It is the empty space which makes the bowl useful”) and prompted to enter the elevator without selecting a destination.

It was our hope that this would be the ideal end to this experience: noting the agency, the power, and the function of these liminal spaces, and completing your journey by submitting yourself to the space itself by allowing the elevator to take you “where it pleases.”

I hope you enjoy!